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Saturday, 3 August 2013

The Vinyl Quilt

This year I've been working with Makower, designing quilts for some of their new fabric lines. It's a fun process, starting with a series of fabric images and a brief. The fabrics come in two colour ways, one of which is orange/green (I've repeated a couple of prints to make the mosaic nice and square).

The brief was to design a quilt for a teenager so I thought of a retro vinyl theme with LPs and album covers.

I can only draw up designs with colours rather than filling with fabric jpegs so the multi talented (especially at piecing and quilting) Jane Davidson used her skills with EQ to draw up the quilt previews. Here is her drawing with the blue colour way.

And then on the day before retreat, the Music fabrics finally arrived and yesterday I finished the quilt I have called "Vinyl". It's s decent sized quilt - 69" x 80" - I'm not one for little quilts, I think a quilt should cover you from your neck to your toes to keep you warm while you watch the new series of the Newsroom.

The LP covers are at a wonky angle but I'm not so good with genuine wonky so they all sit at an identical wonk.

The records are raw edge appliquéd with those little 1" centre circles cut using the Sizzix 1" circle die. I blanket stitched around the edges of the records and then quilted the whole thing with horizontal wavy lines 1.5" apart both using black Aurifil 50wt.

And, whilst I thought that someone of my age presuming to design a quilt a teenager would like was a bit risky, I have had votes of approval from my four kids (aged 11 to 15), my 20 year old niece, my 10 year old neice and, highest approval of all, the uber cool 16 year old daughter of one of my local quilting buddies, Reene of Nellie's Niceties. If you're interested in making your own version of this quilt, Music by Makower will hit stores later this year and the pattern will be in print - watch this space for more information as to where and when.

I actually love the Wonkiness of the album covers. Gives it great movement, where otherwise it would be just squares in squares. I think it would make a great quilt for a teen or tween. Although I'm not sure how many of them have ever used records!

This is sooooo wonderful! My husband and I met at a radio station in the 1980s, so this resonates quite a bit with us on many levels. What I really like is that you then used the fabrics in shapes to make records...really different & something I've never seen.